Best and Worst Workday Ever
Wednesday, Jan 10 2007

What a wild day. I knew that today was going to be bad, for reasons that I will detail below, but something amazingly good happened as well!

I won an award at work. Each month, people send in their best stories of tasks they accomplished for customers (since I’m being deliberately vague about work on my blog nowadays, not even mentioning the name of my employer, all I’m saying is that it’s a concierge service and I handle requests from a lot of high-profile clients). I submitted the story of a proposal I planned that took place in New York and turned from a simple proposal into a five-day extravaganza, with an elaborate proposal, tickets to the hottest concert in town and a baseball playoff in addition to a Broadway show, I pulled strings to get reservations at the hottest restaurants in town, and I kept everything in order and organized. (One part that was omitted from the entry was that I ordered flowers for his new fiancee and her mother, with extra-long notes in Spanish, and I had to spell them out to the florist letter by letter — it took FOREVER!!)

Anyways, I submitted that. Each month, they select around eight to ten stories that they thought were the best. Mine was on the list. Then, everyone in the company was invited to vote for the best one.

And I won!

In addition to the pride, I got a certificate, the “Top Dog” to perch on my desk, a parade of Team Leaders coming in and congratulating me, and — best of all — a $100.00 gift certificate. Which is awesome!!

But what surprised me even more was that I started receiving tons of emails as soon as the announcement went out that I won. A sampling:

“Congratulations! :-)” –Sarah“Congrats! You suck!” –Andy, whom I had beat out for the prize“Awesome!” –Max“Showoff” –Peter“Congrats — you know I helped you on this one. Now people are gonna think you’re a romance expert.” –Eddie“I’m so proud of you!” –Danielle“WOW! That sounds like a crazy request!” –Thierry from the Canadian office

I even got emails from people I had never met, from the Canadian office and everything, which was really, really nice.

But in addition to that, I knew that today was going to be one of the worst days.

One of my absolute favorite coworkers (and people!) had his last day today. He’s been at the company FOREVER, and even though he’s been thinking about leaving for a while, he ended up quitting a few months sooner than he was originally planning.

And he’s moving back to his home state at the end of the month.

God, I’m going to miss him.

So this day has been hard, too. It wasn’t unlike the end of college, when I was fine as soon as I got home for good but was a sobbing mess at least once a day during senior week.

Not that I’m a sobbing mess. But you know what I mean.

So, E, to quote Van Hunt, thank you for turning this day — EVERY day — into sunshine.